Volcano! – Action Cards

The Action cards are proving difficult, it’s hard to get a feeling for how they will work, it’s the sort of thing that needs a lot of play-testing to get right, so I’m going to need to get on it.

I’ve reduced my targets, as I’m on a short time frame for this game. I’m going for 50 Action Cards, made up from 17-18 different Renown Actions and Townspeople Actions.

Each card can be played in two different ways, one to increase your Scientist’s standing (Renown Actions), and one to help save Townspeople (Townspeople Actions). These two ways mean that I can create a large number of different cards from a relatively small pool of ideas. The difficulty comes in balancing the constituent parts, I’d like it if each card had roughly equal value to both methods of play. I’m perfectly happy to have some cards better than others, but I don’t want to have cards that are only ever worth playing in one of the two available ways.

I’ve gone with 50 cards, for two reasons. One, it’s more a more reasonable target for a quickly developed game such as this, and two, I believe that 50 cards will provide enough variety to the game. There will be twelve cards in play at most times, with maybe 2-3 persisting cards remaining on the board. This means there will always be at least 30 cards in the Action deck or discard pile, so even if every player discards and re-draws all cards every turn, it will take at least three turns to cycle through the deck.

I imagine that almost all games will require the discard pile to be re-shuffled into an Action deck at least once, and I think it should rarely happen more than twice. Any more, and I think the cards will get to feel a bit similar over the game, and I’ll have to add in a few more.